Monday, March 27, 2017

"More surgery is being performed with the patient awake and looking on, for both financial and medical reasons. But as surgical patients are electing to keep their eyes wide open, doctor-patient protocol has not kept pace with the new practice."

Tuesday, March 21, 2017

The history of computers is often told as a history of objects, from the
abacus to the Babbage engine up through the code-breaking machines of
World War II. In fact, it is better understood as a history of ideas,
mainly ideas that emerged from mathematical logic, an obscure and
cult-like discipline that first developed in the 19th century.
Mathematical logic was pioneered by philosopher-mathematicians, most
notably George Boole and Gottlob Frege, who were themselves inspired by
Leibniz’s dream of a universal “concept language,” and the ancient
logical system of Aristotle...

Friday, March 17, 2017

You will be asked to repeat a series of sentences. The exercise begins
in quiet, but then it will introduce background noise. The noise comes
in six levels, faint at first but eventually louder than the words.

People with hearing loss start to have some trouble understanding the
words at the second or third level, according to Robert Fifer, director
of audiology and speech pathology at the center. That doesn’t mean that
they can’t understand anything, but they show increasing difficulty
understanding accurately what is said compared to someone with normal
hearing abilities, he said...

However, there’s one weakness to such schemes that’s pretty glaring. If
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like you’re having an absolute blast on the weekends.

Only about half of the medical findings reported in 199 English-language
newspapers actually turn out to hold up when tested in further studies,
the study found. And sorry, dear reader, you're not likely to hear
about those refutations.

Thursday, March 02, 2017

But up until now, just how much urine has been difficult to measure, says chemist Xing-Fang Li
of the University of Alberta. Li and her colleagues report they can now
tell roughly how much pee is in a pool by measuring the artificial
sweeteners carried in most people's urine. Certain sweeteners can be a
good proxy for pee, she says, because they're designed to "go right
through you" and don't break down readily in pool water.

The
scientists calculated that one 220,000-gallon, commercial-size swimming
pool contained almost 20 gallons of urine. In a residential pool
(20-by-40-foot, five-feet deep), that would translate to about two
gallons of pee. It's only about one-hundredth of a percent, but any
urine in a swimming pool can be a health concern for some people, not to
mention that smell that never quite goes away...